Page:Behemoth 1889.djvu/144

 A. All that can be said against them in that point will be excused with the pretext of war, and come under one name of rebellion; saving, that when they summoned any town, it was always in the name of the King and Parliament, the King being in the contrary army, and many times beating them from the siege; I do not see how the right of war can justify such impudence as that. But they pretended that the King was always virtually in the two Houses of Parliament; making a distinction between his person natural and politic; which made the impudence greater, besides the folly of it. For this was but an university quibble, such as boys make use of in maintaining (in the schools) such tenets as they cannot otherwise defend.

In the end of this year they solicited also the Scots to enter England with an army, to suppress the power of the Earl of Newcastle in the north; which was a plain confession, that the Parliament’s forces were, at this time, inferior to the King’s. And most men thought, that if the Earl of Newcastle had then marched southward, and joined his forces with the King’s, that most of the members of Parliament would have fled out of England.

In the beginning of 1643, the Parliament, seeing the Earl of Newcastle’s power in the North grown so formidable, sent to the Scots to hire them to an invasion of England, and (to compliment them in the meantime) made a covenant amongst themselves, such as the Scots had before taken against episcopacy, and demolished crosses and church windows (such as had in them any images of saints) throughout all England. Also in the middle of the year, they made a solemn league with the nation, which was called the Solemn League and Covenant.

B. Are not the Scots as properly to be called foreigners as the Irish? Seeing then they persecuted the Earl of Strafford even to death, for advising the King to make use of Irish forces against the Parliament, with what face could they call in a Scotch army against the King?

A. The King’s party might easily here have discerned